Ronan Farrow - War on Peace - The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Ronan Farrow, 2018

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Ronan Farrow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007575626

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780007575640

Version: 2018-04-18

For Mom.

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE: MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE

PART I: THE LAST DIPLOMATS

1 AMERICAN MYTHS

2 LADY TALIBAN

3 DICK

4 THE MANGO CASE

5 THE OTHER HAQQANI NETWORK

6 DUPLICITY

7 THE FRAT HOUSE

8 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

9 WALKING ON GLASS

10 FARMER HOLBROOKE

11 A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

12 A-ROD

13 PROMISE ME YOU’LL END THE WAR

14 THE WHEELS COME OFF THE BUS

15 THE MEMO

16 THE REAL THING

PART II: SHOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS NEVER

17 GENERAL RULE

18 DOSTUM: HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH AND DISCOURAGING ALL LIES

19 WHITE BEAST

20 THE SHORTEST SPRING

21 MIDNIGHT AT THE RANCH

PART III: PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION

22 THE STATE OF THE SECRETARY

23 THE MOSQUITO AND THE SWORD

24 MELTDOWN

EPILOGUE: THE TOOL OF FIRST RESORT

PICTURE SECTION

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

AMMAN, JORDAN, 2017

[A]ppoint an ambassador who is versed in all sciences, who understands hints, expressions of the face and gestures … The army depends on the official placed in charge of it … peace and its opposite, war, on the ambassador. For the ambassador alone makes and separates allies; the ambassador transacts that business by which kings are disunited or not.

—THE MANUSMRITI , HINDU SCRIPTURE, CA. 1000 BCE

THE DIPLOMAT HAD NO CLUE that his career was over. Before stepping into the secure section of the American embassy, he’d slipped his phone into one of the cubbies on the wall outside, according to protocol. The diplomat had been following protocol for thirty-five years, as walls crumbled and empires fell, as the world grew smaller and cables became teleconferences and the expansive language of diplomacy reduced to the gnomic and officious patter of email. He had missed a few calls and the first email that came in was terse. The director general of the Foreign Service had been trying to reach him. They needed to speak immediately.

The diplomat’s name was Thomas Countryman, which seems like it must be made up, but is not. He was sitting at a borrowed desk in the political section at the heart of the low, sprawling embassy complex in Jordan’s posh Abdoun neighborhood. The embassy was an American contractor’s studied homage to the Middle East: sand-colored stone, with a red diamond-shaped motif on the shatterproof windows that said, “local, but not too local.” Like most American embassies in this part of the world, there was no avoiding the sense that it was a fortress. “We’d build a moat if we could,” a Foreign Service officer stationed there once muttered to me as our armored SUV made its way through the facility’s concrete and steel barriers, past armored personnel carriers full of uniformed soldiers.